Outlook Email Management 📧

So there's three main features that I wanted to cover today.

We're not using AI, we're not using Copilot.

This, these are they're a little bit hidden.

So I just kind of want to show you Because I was walking through this for a client who manages delegated inboxes for a couple of founders and this is going to be extremely helpful for them.

So wanted to show you this in cases was going to be helpful for you as well.

So inside of Outlook I'm on the web version right now.

I head over to settings, few things here.

So if you've ever used Gmail before you may know of categories.

So this is pretty, I mean it's pretty self explanatory in that you have labels, they give you some standard ones to start with.

They're just colors but you can rename them to.

Let's say I want to rename red category to VIP client.

I can save that and create any new labels as well.

This is going to start making up our organization system because honestly I think one of the hardest parts of setting up automation systems Is the thinking process that goes behind how you want these things to work.

So what categories, what folders, when to use flags.

You'll see how that plays into the different features in a minute.

So I want to go over to the mail setting now and inside of mail you'll notice that there are quick steps and rules.

So instead of quick steps I want to touch on this one real quickly and I've set up a few sample quick steps already and I'll show you where you can find them and engage with these buttons.

So if you've ever worked with some basic automation tools before, I mean this or even zapier make.com let me go into track follow up and I'm going to edit Quick step.

So it's, it's pretty simple.

In here you have the name of the actual steps you want to name it something that you can recognize pretty easily from your email and then you have action items.

So basically you want to track something to follow up on, you click a button and it's going to trigger these action items.

And the action items can include things like category, you can snooze the email, you can choose how long you snooze.

That Email for, so it'll come back into your inbox.

You can also move it to specific folders that you've created.

Let me click on add another action just so you can see what other options we have available to us.

So we can copy, two folders, delete it, mark read or unread.

We can set retention policies, categorize flag mark complete.

You can pin it, you can create a task inside of, the planner tool, I believe, and, or forward this to specific people you know.

If you're, you're forwarding it to your founder, that could be very helpful or to an entire group and inside of, your organization.

And you also have some AI options, including reply with meeting or schedule with copilot.

Haven't had the opportunity to give this a try, but definitely check it out.

And so once you save the Quick step, now where we're going to find that is going to be once you click on email, you'll see here that we have executive review.

That's one of the quick steps that we set up.

Now we click on track, follow up, and all of those action items that we just configured for that Quick step has been applied with a click of a button.

That's one way you can start to augment the work that you do with your emails.

The next thing that you do is set up some rules.

So we're going to go over to Settings again, mail rules, and in here I have a rule set up for a VIP client.

So the way that rules differ from Quick Steps is that if you have the one off email or like emails that come in that require a lot of judgment on your part, you need to decide when and where it goes to certain teams, whether it needs to be flagged, urgency, et cetera.

I'd actually recommend starting with quick steps to begin with.

One, because they have more actions and more capabilities, and two, because then, you can just try things for a little while, see if it's working for you, see how often you're clicking certain buttons.

And if it makes sense to you, then you kind of graduate it into a rule.

rule.

Let me go into the VIP client, I can edit the rule and I can set conditions.

This is our trigger with Quick Steps.

Our trigger is our manual click of a button with rules.

This is automated.

The condition we set can be any one of these things.

We can be from certain people.

Let's say you get emails from a specific person, you know that person's vip, they like fast responses.

Maybe you want to be flagged are notified as soon as that person emails you, so you can set those senders, emails received for others.

If you are again are managing delegate inboxes, right sender address, you can add entire domain names, which is exactly what I did here.

Any emails that come from this domain is going to trigger actions and the actions would be to categorize the those emails as red category.

Or in this case, I could choose VIP client and I could flag that message as something that I need to take care of today.

rule.

So you can run this rule just to test it out, make sure that it works properly.

but go ahead and save that.

And this is something that after you toggle on should run automatically.

Go ahead and test it if you can, from that email domain name and see if it'll automatically categorize or flag things as it should.

The other thing too is with the rules, you have priority rules.

So if you have a VIP client at the very top of the list and then you have a competing rule that sits beneath it, this rule is going to take priority.

So just something to keep in mind, those are the three features that are already built into Microsoft Outlook that can help you manage your inbox better.